The Universe is Indifferent: Theology, Philosophy, and Mad Men

The Universe is Indifferent

Theology, Philosophy, and MadMen

Edited by

Ann W. Duncan

and

Jacob L. Goodson

The Universe is Indifferent

Theology, Philosophy, and Mad Men

Copyright © 2016 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-62564-897-6

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-8562-9

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-0529-1

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Duncan, Ann W., editor. | Goodson, Jacob L., editor.

Title: The universe is indifferent : theology, philosophy, and Mad Men / edited by Ann W. Duncan and Jacob L. Goodson.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-62564-897-6 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-4982-8562-9 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-0529-1 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mad Men (Television program) | Television broadcasting—Religious aspects—Christianity.

Classification: PN1992.77.M226 U6 2016 (paperback) | PN1992.77.M226 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 08/11/16

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Business Ethics

Chapter 1: It’s the Real Thing

Chapter 2: The Business of Creativity

Chapter 3: Mad Manners

Chapter 4: All the Research Points to the Fact that Mothers Feel Guilty

Chapter 5: Supporting this World’s Ballerinas

Chapter 6: If I don’t go in that office every day, who am I?

Part Two: Who Is Don Draper?

Chapter 7: Counterculture Beatrices?

Chapter 8: Moving Forward as Return

Chapter 9: You Are Okay

Chapter 10: Don Draper, Double Consciousness, and the Invisibility of Blackness

Chapter 11: The Erotic Reduction of Don Draper

Part Three: Politics and Social Theory

Chapter 12: Zou Bisou Bisou

Chapter 13: Exitus et Reditus in Marriage

Chapter 14: Uneasy Bedfellows

Chapter 15: Mad Men, Bad Parents

Chapter 16: I Can’t Believe That’s the Way God Is

Chapter 17: We Don’t Know What’s Really Going On

Contributors

I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent.

Don Draper, The Hobo Code, Season 1, Episode 8

Acknowledgments

The editors of this volume wish to thank Goucher College and Southwestern College for their support of this project. Specifically, we thank the Goucher College Aitchison Faculty Development Fund for summer research support and Southwestern College for providing research assistance through its Honors program. Thank you to Lindsey Graber for her research and editorial support throughout the project. We also owe thanks to Chris Spinks, our editor at Wipf and Stock, who provided the initial encouragement to undertake this project and constant support throughout its development. Finally, we wish to thank our respective spouses—Daniel and Angela—who were our faithful companions on innumerable evenings watching the stories of Mad Men unfold and who have been our first and most constant conversation partners about the series.

Introduction

—Ann W. Duncan and Jacob L. Goodson

The AMC television series, Mad Men , takes its viewers on an emotional, psychological, and sociological roller coaster ride in the setting of New York City. The years depicted span March 1960 through either the autumn 1970 or winter 1971 —depending upon one’s interpretation of the Coca-Cola advertisement, an ad that first aired on radio on February 12 , 1971 . Created by Matthew Weiner, Mad Men develops and follows the lives of Donald Draper/Dick Whitman, Peggy Olson, Joan Holloway/Harris, Roger Sterling, Pete Campbell, Megan Calvet/Draper, Betty Draper/Francis, and Sally Draper as they negotiate careers, love and marriage, and dramatic social and political change. This collection helps readers navigate the exciting roller coaster ride that is Mad Men , through exploring unknown depths of its characters and storylines. After enjoying the ride of watching all seven seasons of Mad Men , we hope that you take pleasure in the ride of reading ‘The Universe Is Indifferent’: Theology, Philosophy, and Mad Men.

The Universe Is Indifferent?

In Season 1, Don receives a bonus check in the amount of $2,500 and brings it to his mistress’s apartment with the hopes of inviting her to join him on a trip to Paris. He finds her relaxing with a group of marijuana-smoking friends markedly different from his colleagues on Madison Avenue. These friends engage with Don about the vices of his work and conclude, You make the lie. You invent want. You’re for them, not us. Don responds with an equal amount of clarity: I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent. His mistress rises and comes to Don, and he again invites her to Paris. She claims that she cannot go with him; he signs his bonus check, puts it in her brassiere, and tells her to buy a car. Don turns to leave, but one of her friends gives Don a warning: There are cops. You can’t go out there. Don responds without hesitation, "No, you can’t."

These beatniks remain critical toward power and society but not nihilistic about potential change within the world. Don claims that their criticism has no object: how does one bring the man down when the man does not exist? Their protests remain directed toward a ghost, a phantom. For them, Don is the face of this ghost—this phantom. But that becomes too easy of a target. Don cannot be the face of the man because there is no man for them to bring down and critique. The claim, the universe is indifferent, is not only an existentialist claim—because it means that we must create meaning for ourselves—but also a nihilistic claim in the sense that nothingness has as much power and sway as the meaning we make.

According to the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, we can distinguish between two forms of nihilism: (a) Incomplete nihilism does indeed replace the former values with others, but it still posits the latter always in the old position of authority that is, as it were, gratuitously maintained as the ideal realm of the suprasensory; (b) Complete nihilism, however, must in addition do away even with the place of value itself, with the suprasensory as a realm, and accordingly must posit and revalue values differently.¹ Which version of nihilism fits the world of Mad Men better remains up to the judgment of the viewer, but we certainly hope that this collection informs the question in helpful and interesting ways.

Chapter Previews

This book contains seventeen chapters divided into three sections. While the subject matters of the chapters have a decidedly socio-historical focus, the authors use basic topics as starting points for philosophical, religious, and theological reflections. Mad Men reveals deep truths concerning the social trends of the 1960s and early 1970s in American life. Because of this, Mad Men deserves a significant amount of reflection from philosophical, religious, and theological perspectives. Some of the chapters go beyond mere reflection and make deeper inquiries into what these trends say about American cultural habits, the business world within Western capitalism, and the rapid social changes (gender, race, and sexuality) during this period. In what follows, we provide brief previews of each chapter.

Part 1 is ordered from general-to-particular-topics, with its bookends as two different perspectives on identity and work. In ‘It’s the Real Thing’: Identity and Sincerity in Mad Men, Howard Pickett addresses both ethical and unethical business practices found in Mad Men. Pickett claims that the series, itself, represents what he calls a narrative ethic: a storyline, plot twists, and character development. All of these elements allow businesses in the real world to assess their own ethical approaches. Throughout Mad Men, we find a close connection between advertising, deception, and lying. Surprisingly, Don Draper refuses the temptation to lie in relation to his client, Lucky Strikes. The ambiguity of Don’s character comes into play in the sense that while he is a liar (he consistently lies to those closest to him: Betty, Megan, and his children), Mad Men raises philosophical questions concerning authenticity, sincerity, and truth—especially in relation to Don’s identity. Additionally, Pickett observes that Mad Men connects sex to selling, religion to retail. These connections play out in multiple advertisements produced throughout the series. Pickett claims that we need to maintain distinctions between public and private sincerity in order to establish healthy and moral business practices within the real world.

Jennifer Phillips begins her chapter by distinguishing between artists, businesspersons, and creative workers. In The Business of Creativity: From SCDP to the Modern Creative Enterprise, Phillips describes the ways in which creative workers find inspiration. Places of inspiration come from the internal, through the production of ideas, or the external, for sake of awards and profits. Phillips argues that it is more virtuous to find inspiration inwardly, through the production of ideas. Creative workers need freedom and flexibility in order to express themselves. Business people need to manage their creative workers by allowing them flexibility with hours, lots of paid vacation, and promotions relating to the common good. Phillips concludes by claiming that our social responsibility concerns promoting advertising for the sake of the common good—which involves avoiding advertisements and business practices that harms or objectifies people.

Sarah Conrad Sours highlights the theme of courtesy found throughout Mad Men. In her chapter, Mad Manners: Courtesy, Conflict, and Social Change, Sours shows how courtesy takes on different purposes; for instance, Peggy’s acts of courtesy are connected to her genuine moral character whereas Pete’s acts of courtesy come across as insincere and manipulative. Courtesy plays a role in power dynamics, perpetuating the socially constructed authorities. Wealthy white men carry the most power, which becomes evident in their relationships with women and people of color. White men have the freedom to make sexual comments and gestures toward the women in the office, asking crass personal questions—questions the women would never dream of asking the men. The few African-American characters in this series always act with courtesy but rarely receive much courtesy in return. The two African-American secretaries know all of the names of the employees and refer to them with their proper titles—courteous acts that are never reciprocated. The more powerful party bends the rules of social courtesy, while the weaker parties adhere to courtesy at all costs. Courtesy becomes a way for characters to navigate social relationships in their professional and personal lives.

In "‘All the Research Points to the Fact that Mothers Feel Guilty’: Maternal Desire and the Social Construction of Motherhood in Mad Men," Ann W. Duncan explores the confluence of maternal desire, societal paradigms of motherhood and vocation in the lives of Betty Draper/Harris, Peggy Olson and Joan Holloway/Harris. As a societal construction mediated by the often-conflicting maternal desire, career ambition and quest for personal fulfillment, motherhood finds expression in dramatically different ways in the characters of Mad Men. Through attention to theories of motherhood and feminism through the twentieth century, Duncan’s chapter examines these three women as a lens through which to understand the complexities of motherhood in the contemporary age. Such an examination reveals that these character’s stories are both deeply conditioned by their historical context and directly relevant to contemporary discourse about motherhood and feminism.

In "‘Supporting this World’s Ballerinas’: Learning from Mad Men’s Female Workers," Kristen Deede Johnson focuses on the question of women’s ability to pursue their dreams—both professionally and personally—through the lens of a theology of the home. Throughout Mad Men, women struggle to balance their personal and professional lives. Megan achieves her professional dream as an actress, but her marriage crumbles into divorce. Betty achieves her dream of marriage, children, and a home in the suburbs but gives up her professional dream as a model. Peggy achieves her professional dream of being a copywriter but foregoes motherhood by giving up her own child up for adoption. Joan succeeds within the firm, but her marriage also ends in divorce and she then regrets how much she relies on her own mother for childcare for her son. What is the response, perhaps the solution, to these tragic conflicts between professional careers and home economics? Somewhat counter-intuitively, Johnson claims that a Christian theology of the home contributes to a positive perception of housework. If housework becomes significant enough to acquire God’s attention, as detailed in the Bible, then it deserves our human attention. Humans have certain limitations and the repetitive tasks of care-giving and domestic work serve as moments of holy leisure.

In "‘If I Don’t Go In that Office Everyday, then Who am I?’: Culture, Identity, and Work in Mad Men, David Matzko McCarthy argues that the shift from Dick Whitman to Don Draper comes strictly through the process of Don defining his identity in terms of he who is at work. McCarthy claims that the only constancy Draper has in his life concerns his role at work while several other relationships—family members, friends, mistresses, and even his sibling—fade away. While Don works, he operates as an artist: not the Romantic sense of artist, but in terms of being patient and concerned with getting it right." He allows time for ideas to form and forces bad ideas onto neither clients nor colleagues. Don also operates as a craftsman. A craftsman differs from an artist because a craftsman identifies with a particular community. Don finds that his community depends upon him, but he relies on them as well. Throughout Mad Men, Don searches for authentic community, cultural unity, and an overall sense of belonging.

McCarthy’s chapter provides an ideal transition from the section Business Ethics to the section Who Is Don Draper? Originally, we planned for Part 2 to contain studies of multiple characters within Mad Men; as it happens in the storylines of Mad Men, however, it all comes back to Don! Once we recognized that we had five chapters—counting neither McCarthy’s nor Goodson’s chapter as part of the five—reflecting upon Don’s character, we did what Don would expect us to do: we gave him his own section. Part 2 contains five chapters: the first two chapters are explicitly theological in the sense that they employ religious or theological scholarship to understand Don’s character and how Don gets perceived by others; the next three chapters are more philosophical in the sense that they employ arguments and sources from the canon of Western philosophy.

In Countercultural Beatrices?: Don Meets Dante, Gabriel Haley uses Dante’s Inferno as a lens through which to view Don’s actions and moral progress. First, Haley discusses the role of Beatrice in Dante’s account; Beatrice symbolizes love as a physical presence and a spiritual guide. According to Haley, Megan represents Beatrice for Don in Mad Men by taking on an identity of the other and surprising Don with both countercultural and counterintuitive actions. Secondly, Haley explains the notion of how properly ordered desire leads to moral progress within Dante’s writing. Though Megan represents Beatrice, Haley argues that Don displays a disordered desire for Megan—which inhibits the moral progress of Don’s character. Haley suggests, however, that the lighthearted tone at the end of the series reflects the potential for Don’s moral progress: Don’s willingness to be part of the counterculture and to confess his past mistakes, prepares him for healthier relationships in the future.

In ‘Moving Forward’ as Return: The Redemptive Journey of Don Draper, Jackson Lashier addresses the duplicity of Don Draper’s life: false self vs. true self. Relying on categories from Thomas Merton’s theology, Lashier connects living in the false self to being in exile. The Israelites experienced exile as a result of their failure to live faithfully into their covenant with God. As a displacement from one’s homeland, the Israelites experienced exile as being displaced from the promise land; exile, however, also refers to not being who you were created to be. Draper lives in a place of false self, which leads to a feeling of emptiness like a never-ending meaningless carousel ride. Lashier argues that the way out of exile, ironically, involves death. This death is not literal death but a metaphorical death—death to the false self. Draper needs to die to his false self in order to start over. Through multiple storylines, we gain a glimpse of Draper dying to his unrelenting desire to start over and then begin to embrace his true self—an authentic self.

Engaging the existentialist philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, Seth Vannatta provides the strongest conceptual description for what we mean by the title of the book: ‘The Universe Is Indifferent.’ In his chapter, "‘You Are Okay’: Donsein’s Despair and our Road to Recovery," Vannatta treats Don’s character on the terms of Heidegger’s nihilistic existentialism vs. Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism. Kierkegaard calls for passionate action whereas Heidegger calls for authenticity. In order for Don to find authenticity, according to Kierkegaard, he must reject the world and begin to embrace his inner self. Through a Heideggerian lens, Vannatta demonstrates that Don can achieve authenticity only through modifying his anonymous modes of existence. Don must recover himself by resisting anxiety and despair. Vannatta suggests that anxiety, in fact, awakens Don from his slumber and causes him to feel uncanny and not-at-home-in-the-world. For Kierkegaard, the road to recovery involves a road that turns away from despair and turns towards faith. For Heidegger, self-recovery remains grounded in Don’s actions and his anticipation of the future.

Nsenga K. Burton, in her chapter Don Draper, Double Consciousness and the Invisibility of Blackness? employs W. E. B. DuBois’s notion of double consciousness to explore the multiplicity of Don’s character as well as the representation of racial, class and religious minorities throughout the series. In so doing, Burton unsettles a frequent critique of the show—that it fails to address race in any substantial way. Burton argues that the series addresses race alongside many markers of identity and social change tackled throughout the seven seasons by exploring Don’s complicated relationship to his own whiteness. His hidden identity and early experience of poverty mark him as an other or an outsider in ways similar to other characters marked by their race, gender, ethnicity or religion. In this way, Burton argues, Don is coded as a black man and much of his existential struggle can be explained through this lens. The myth of whiteness evident in Don’s character parallels the myth of the non-racial narrative of the series.

In The Erotic Reduction of Don Draper: Iconicity, Idolatry, and Madness, Carole Baker explains and utilizes Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of the erotic. Marion’s philosophy offers a way to reflect upon Don’s character, within both personal and professional contexts, in terms of icon and idol. Baker interprets the title, Mad Men, as suggestive of a philosophy of madness—revealing the connections between idolatry and madness. We, as viewers, recognize the fictional nature of Draper’s character even as we recognize the very real aspects of his character. The realism within this paradoxical man invites the viewer to moral judgment and reflection. Through application of elements of the erotic reduction to Mad Men’s leading man, Baker explores the paradoxical nature of the phenomenology of love.

Part 3 addresses topics relating to politics and social theory: marriage, parenting, political identity, and the role of religion in individual and public life. Part 3 begins with Jacob L. Goodson’s "Zou Bisou Bisou: Feminist Theory and Sexual Ethics in Mad Men" as a transition from Don’s character (Part 2) to the social impact of feminism on sexuality within marriage. Goodson navigates the sexual aspects of Don’s marriages to both Betty and Megan. Goodson makes a case for viewing Mad Men through the philosophical lenses of Immanuel Kant’s deontological sexual ethics, Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist-feminist theory of sex and sexuality, and Catherine MacKinnon’s radical feminist sexual ethics. Doing so helps to reveal the empowerment experienced by Betty and Megan through the sexual aspects of their marriage to Don.

While Goodson merely suggests the significance of ordinary life for understanding marriage, Brandon Morgan and Jonathan Tran take the next step and establish the full significance of the connections between marriage and ordinary life. In their chapter, "Exitus et Reditus in Marriage: Mad Men vs. Hollywood Remarriage Comedies," Morgan and Tran look to the work of Stanley Cavell to make sense of the significance of ordinary life for sustaining marriage. As their sub-title suggests, they compare and contrast Mad Men with the genre of Hollywood remarriage comedies—a genre carefully studied by Cavell.

In their chapter, Uneasy Bedfellows: On Pete and Trudy’s Marriage, Matthew Emile Vaughan and Christopher J. Ashley guide the reader through Pete and Trudy’s rocky relationship from the first through the seventh seasons of Mad Men. Pete Campbell comes from old money and feels entitled to his position and status. Although Trudy’s character is less developed than Pete’s, we know that she represents new money and she takes on the role of Pete’s ethical surrogate throughout the series. Pete’s desire for leadership and power carries over into his marriage with Trudy. Pete wants to be in charge, but Trudy wants to an equal partnership. Pete and Trudy’s marriage encompasses both hardship and success. For viewers who consider themselves as part of the millennial generation, Pete and Trudy’s marriage represents the ways of their grandparents’ marriage. As a result of seeing the hardships of their grandparents’ marriage, millennials now tend to wait until their late twenties or early thirties to get married and have kids.

Power and sex are two key themes that saturate Mad Men. This leaves children on the margins throughout the series. In her chapter, Mad Men, Bad Parents: Representations of Parenting in Mad Men, Susan Frekko addresses the themes of parenting found in Betty’s and Don’s parenting styles. Frekko emphasizes both the adult-centric and neoliberal contexts in which Sally and Bobby are raised. Responsibility and self-regulation become the two highest values of neoliberal parenting. Betty fails to show responsibility and self-regulation through her addiction to cigarettes and vain concerns about her appearance. While Don tends to show some restraint when it comes to punishing the children, he has his own addictions to alcohol and sex—as well as his habitual tendencies to deceive and lie. Frekko argues that viewers see these failings and are invited to develop feelings of superiority to the characters on Mad Men. Gender equality, racial equality, and bad parenting are not yet behind us; society must continue to work for a positive change in all three of these areas.

In ‘I Can’t Believe that’s the Way God Is’: Peggy’s Pre-Vatican II Catholicism, Heidi Schlumpf begins with Season 2 of Mad Men—in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of the end of the world. Characters find their escape in multiple ways, but Peggy—in particular—goes to church. She finds herself in a pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church—which displays a traditional view of women, an emphasis on the sins of sex and sexuality, and a strict hierarchical structure. Peggy rebels against the Roman Catholic view of womanhood by taking birth control and having sex outside of marriage. At her job, Peggy encounters the secular culture and quickly realizes that both the secular view of womanhood and the Christian view of womanhood remain necessarily connected to female sexuality. Peggy obtains an illusion of respect from Gill, the young Catholic priest, when Gill asks for her advice on his sermons and asks for her help with a promotional flyer. Gill, however, refuses to fully support her decisions concerning the flyer. Eventually, Peggy stands up for herself and seemingly walks away from the Roman Catholic Church.

Jared D. Larson’s chapter, "‘We Don’t Really Know What’s Going On’: Mad Men as a Bellwether of the Politics to Come," brings the collection to a strong conclusion. As the sub-title suggests, Larson connects the political problems of the 1960s to the current (2000s) political problems of the United States of America. Arguing that we never learn from our mistakes, Larson shows how American politics continues to struggle with issues of race, gender, capitalism, nationalism, and political identity. In the first two seasons of Mad Men, the threat of the Cuban Missile attack and nuclear war with the Soviets propelled many citizens and politicians into fear. This fear was paired with a polarization between America and foreign countries. The presidential campaign between Nixon and Kennedy established a new connection between Presidential Campaigns and advertising agencies. Mad Men also shows the level of privilege held by some people in society: in the 1960s, police officers favor white, wealthy, men; in the 2000s, this favoritism remains. Lastly, Larson connects politics and big business during the 1960s, the nascent years of the now omnipotent military-industrial complex. Not much has changed in our current government: America remains run by fear with strict polarization, certain privileges, and the end goal of making money. One possible solution to these problems, offered by Larson, concerns how more television series—in the model of Mad Men—ought to be produced allowing its audiences to reflect more deeply upon the past, present, and future.

This reflection upon the past, present, and future, hopefully manifests throughout this entire collection. While multiple volumes could be authored to address the internal plot twists and character development alone, our understandings of the show itself are only deepened by connections to happenings in our past and present reality. Whether in relation to gender, race, business ethics, personal morality, or marriage, our reactions to the seemingly outdated social mores and paradigms represented in this series reveal both how far we have come and how deeply entrenched our own existential struggles, moral quandaries and deep seated anxieties lie. This reflectivity makes Mad Men a classic for this generation and one that viewers watch again and again. We hope this collection will only enhance the joy, amusement, disgust, and reflection that experience entails.

Bibliography

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Part

1

Business Ethics

Chapter 1

It’s the Real Thing

Identity and Sincerity in Mad Men

—Howard Pickett

Every Great Ad Tells a Story—Narrative Ethics and Mad Men

Don’t fool yourself. This is some very dirty business." Madison Avenue executive Roger Sterling’s admonition to his younger colleague Pete Campbell comes on the heels of a decision to ask office manager Joan Holloway to prostitute herself in order to win a coveted account with British automaker Jaguar. ¹ Although Sterling’s words ostensibly condemn Campbell’s plan, the ad exec’s actions tell a different story. Immediately prior to his comment, Sterling has acquiesced (along with the other partners in the room) to the dirty business Campbell proposes. Furthermore, it is Sterling who prevents any further protest or change of plans, lodging his (apparent) complaint as he stands up to leave Campbell and partner Lane Pryce behind to make the arrangements with Joan. In light of these actions, Sterling’s comment seems less like a condemnation and more like a cynical acceptance of the amoral, even immoral, nature of corporate survival. "This is some very dirty business, and, he implies, there is no avoiding dirty hands. Don’t fool yourself," he says; business opposes (even precludes) the other-oriented moral point of view. ²

To anyone familiar with Roger Sterling’s perspective, business ethics may seem a dubious notion, if not a contradiction in terms. To anyone familiar with the AMC television series, an essay on business ethics in Mad Men may seem doubly dubious. Best-known for the worst tendencies of corporate America (e.g., the sexism, dishonesty, and greed on display in this episode among most others), Matthew Weiner’s series seems, at first glance, incapable of cultivating ethical business practices. Upon closer investigation, however, Mad Men’s serial narrative may be uncommonly well suited to business ethics. The series is, admittedly, no treatise on advertising ethics; what it offers, though, may be more valuable than a treatise. It serially dramatizes the thoroughly human (i.e., the emotionally complex, temporal) human beings at the heart of business and ethics alike. With its attention to these thoroughly realistic (read: messy) human subjects, this essay highlights questions the series raises as a series, questions about: (1) the discernibility and value of truth and sincerity; (2) the mutable, even malleable quality of desire, personal identity and moral character; and (3) the complicated intersections between office and world: i.e., the knotty relationships among the personal, the professional, and the political. In short, the essay traces the moral ramifications of the radically temporal (if not existential) view of the self at the heart of Weiner’s series. In doing so, the essay also models an alternative strategy for business ethics.

As a quick glance at a number of standard textbooks and course syllabi reveals, business ethics typically focuses on a narrow set of practical decisions for managers.³ It also typically assumes a narrow scope of moral attention and a narrow view of truth, personal identity, and autonomy. What Mad Men offers, in contrast, is a critique by expansion, inserting into business ethics oft-neglected questions and perspectives. What Mad Men simultaneously offers is a narrative ethics approach to advertising and business. Its critique by expansion is due, not only to what the series presents, but also to how it presents it—namely, as a series. Broadly speaking, narrative ethics refers to any intersection between narrative and ethics, whether: (1) the use of ethics to illuminate narrative (e.g., considerations of moral responsibilities among authors, readers, and characters)⁴ or (2) the use of narrative to illuminate ethics (e.g., the view that moral judgments depend on an agent’s role within a particular life-narrative).⁵ Because what Weiner and team offer is not just a powerful story, but a powerful story about the power of stories, narrative ethics seems especially apt to Mad Men.

To be sure, with its reliance on case studies, business ethics has long been attuned to the indispensability of narrative and narrative ethics. The point of this essay, then, is not that Mad Men introduces narrative where once there was none. Rather, Mad Men emphasizes and extends narrative’s place in practical thought. Unlike the typical business ethics casebook, Mad Men presents a detailed story that complicates the relationship between public and private, past and present, even appearance and reality. Most significantly (if ironically), Weiner’s fictitious series replaces the unified, rational fiction of a self at the center of business ethics with the real thing—i.e., mad men and women better represented by narrative than theory.⁶

Where the Truth Lies—Truth in Advertising

Unsurprisingly, a television series about the inner-workings of an ad agency has a great deal to say (and show) about the principal issue in advertising ethics: deception.⁷ Tellingly, the series introduces main character Donald Draper in the midst of a moral dilemma. Creative director at a Madison Avenue ad agency, Don is looking for a new way to sell cigarettes now that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is cracking down on lies about the safety of smoking."⁸ If Don’s fictional agency is anything like the real agency described in Samm Sinclair Baker’s The Permissible Lie (1968), then the culture [i]nside the agency . . . is hardly conducive to truth telling; instead, the usual thinking in forming a campaign is first what can we say, true or not, that will sell the product best, and, only second, how can we avoid censure by the FTC.⁹ Faced with a similar office climate, Don initially tosses the health report on smoking into his office wastebasket, while his boss, Roger Sterling, accuses the health advocates of their own deceptive manipulation of the media. With this opening dilemma, the series highlights both the deception and the harm unethical advertising can do.

In lieu of simplistic moralizing, however, the show offers something more than a series-long indictment of the ad industry. By providing its main character the moral integrity lacked by many of his coworkers (e.g., unctuous Pete Campbell), Mad Men complicates our view of human character and the world of advertising. As we come to see, Don, whatever his faults, refuses to lie in his ads. Yet, having ruled out lying in the strict sense (and having nearly lost the cigarette account as a result), Don adopts another sales technique, one with questionable moral dimensions of its own. Don will, as he says elsewhere, change the conversation.¹⁰ In short, Don sells products by making true, yet distracting claims about them—in this case, that Lucky Strikes are toasted.

Granted, one might still condemn Don and his ad—e.g., for selling a dangerous (albeit legal) product. By doing business that degrades and destroys lives, Don and Lucky Strike violate what Buddhist thinkers label right livelihood.¹¹ If he has violated a moral duty here, however, it is not the duty of truth-telling. Despite his infamous opposition to lying (including to a murderer on your doorstep inquiring into the whereabouts of your loved one), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) insists that one (Don included presumably) has a duty to avoid telling untruths; he does not have a corresponding duty to tell the whole truth. One has a duty to truthfulness, not candor.¹²

Nonetheless, one might wonder if Don and the managers from Lucky Strike have a duty to tell, if not the whole truth, then, at least, key aspects of it. Does Don’s ad, despite the accuracy of its claims about Lucky Strikes, do wrong by omitting central claims—e.g., about cigarettes’ fatal health consequences? In their desire to preserve customer autonomy, some critics of modern advertising would say yes. Drawing on the so-called golden rule, David Holley insists, As a practical guide, a salesperson might consider, ‘What would I want to know, if I were considering buying this product?’¹³ If adopted, Holley’s golden rule would presumably remind Don that customers want to know that a product is likely to kill them. Customer autonomy, in short, requires adequate information. In that case, the Lucky Strike ad seemingly deserves condemnation.

More precisely, if the salesperson alone is tasked with providing that adequate information, then the Lucky Strike ad violates the stipulation that "No advertisements should mislead by inaccuracy, ambiguity, exaggeration, omission, or otherwise."¹⁴ However, if the salesperson alone must provide that information, then the job of the salesperson has become exceedingly different from—and more demanding than—what it had been before. This level of responsibility would require sellers to know every major detail about the market, and to inform buyers of those details, including the lower prices of competitors’s products at other stores in town—or even online.¹⁵ Yet, we need not assume that the salesperson alone is tasked with the responsibility of preserving customer autonomy. The key question, therefore, is not whether or not Don’s ad omits valuable information (whether it says, "It’s toasted—and deadly"). The key question is whether that omission is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances (in the words of the FTC’s Deception Policy Statement).¹⁶ As the episode’s opening scene makes clear, information about the health risks of smoking is readily available to the American public from other sources; as Don’s waiter observes, "I love smoking [. . .] My wife hates it. Reader’s Digest says it will kill you."

Nonetheless, Don knows advertising has its questionable moral aspects, acknowledged most memorably, perhaps, in an exchange he imagines with his deceased father.¹⁷ As Don imagines that conversation (more accurately, hallucinates it), Don’s father (and so, perhaps, Don himself) thinks advertising is: worthless (You’re a bum); effeminate (Look at your hands. They’re as soft as a woman’s); unproductive (What do you do? What do you make?); and generally dishonest (You grow bullshit). As another character says to Don, You make the lie, a not uncommon view of advertising, in fact.¹⁸ According to one recent survey, Seventy-four percent of American consumers either ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat strongly’ believe that ‘most advertisements deliberately stretch the truth about the products they advertise.¹⁹

A primetime cable series, Mad Men is, needless to say, interested in more than a moral evaluation of the ad industry. Madison Avenue advertisers (the mad men of the show’s title) occasion reflection on the moral complexity and inscrutability of humankind, not just ad-men. Don is, as viewers know, particularly complex and inscrutable. His integrity in the ad notwithstanding, Don is, in fact, a liar—most often covering over his marital infidelity. Resisting simplistic moralizing once again, Mad Men presents neither devil nor angel, but a complex, messy, actually existing human.²⁰ Furthermore, by giving Don more integrity at work than at home, the show maps a surprising fissure between the private and the public and raises intriguing questions in the process. Does Don’s integrity in the boardroom, which he lacks in the bedroom, demonstrate America’s obsession with work? Does it figure a modern desire to find identity in the office rather than the home?

By highlighting Don’s inconsistent truthfulness, the show also raises questions about the consistency of human (moral) character. In light of Don’s split moral identity (something more easily represented by narrative than theory), the series echoes a growing chorus of voices challenging the view that the cultivation of virtue is the centerpiece of ethics. By exposing the inconsistency and contextuality of character, Mad Men echoes the situationist critique of virtue ethics.²¹ As the label suggests, situationists hold that a situational stimulus has substantial effects on our moral decisions, in fact, more so than does character.²² In a well-known (admittedly ironic) experiment, seminary students tasked with giving a talk on the Good Samaritan parable (the best-known New Testament story about helping neighbors in need) were more likely to stop and help someone in distress (actually a confederate in the study) if they thought they had ample time before the talk (a seemingly trivial factor) than if they thought they were running late (63 percent compared with 10 percent).²³ Like Mad Men, situationism reminds us of the messy, unstable complexities of flesh-and-blood human beings. Insofar as they aim to be practical, business and advertising ethics ought to keep this messiness in mind.

Mad Men also raises questions about truth by underscoring the finitude of human perception and our vulnerability to deception. Not only is character inconsistent; moral judgment is, too. For that matter, not only are the characters on the show deceived (e.g., by their cheating partners); we, too, are deceived, especially by means of the series’ many surprising twists. Thanks to its serial quality, Mad Men not only states (as philosophical essays might) but also performs this vulnerability to deception. The series opener, to take a prominent case, concludes with the surprising revelation that Don is married with kids. Given Don’s involvement with Midge (with whom he spends the night in the first half of the episode) and Rachel (with whom he has a flirtatious dinner date), not to mention given the absence of his wedding ring (the Band of Gold about which Don Cherry sings in the opening scene), a first-time viewer might rightly wonder where Don is, let alone who Betty Draper is, when Don enters her suburban home and bedroom in the final minutes of the first episode.²⁴ Only in retrospect (so crucial in Mad Men) do we learn that the ad-man, who refuses to lie in the profession known for lying, lies to those closest to him and also to the audience.

To be fair, like virtue ethics, the show is, in the end, less interested in what we do than in who we are. In short, it is less interested in the lies we tell than in the lies we are. Don is lying, not only about his fidelity, but also about his identity. As we learn by the end of Season 1, Don is not Don, but Dick; at least, he used to be Dick. Like Ragged Dick (the title character from Horatio Alger’s story of another up-and-coming New Yorker), Dick Whitman (alias Donald Draper) rose from rags to, if not riches, then middle-class respectability. Like Ragged Dick, Mad Men’s main character also embodies the American Dream. Like another fictional antecedent, Jimmy Gatz (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby), Dick Whitman embodies that dream precisely because of his creative, even deceptive, techniques of self-fashioning.²⁵ It is his morally ambivalent talent for storytelling that makes him successful. As anyone familiar with the show knows, Don Draper is a master ad-man; however, as anyone familiar with the show also knows, Don is his own best ad. For good and for bad, he is a man who can tell a story (i.e., narrative or fib).

Don is, of course, not the only one whose identity is not what it seems. Don may be an actor, but so is his second wife Megan (quite literally in her case). Her roles as French twins on a television soap opera parallel Don’s own multiple identities.²⁶ Salvatore Romano, Don’s closeted gay colleague, has also been disguised for seasons, lying about (if not also to) himself.²⁷ After learning of Sal’s affair with a male bellhop, Don, an expert at identity manipulation himself, offers Sal the same tagline he offers London Fog raincoats: Limit your exposure.²⁸ Notably, Peggy Olson also has her share of secrets, including the baby she abandons at the end of Season 1.²⁹ Together, these secrets drive home the inaccessibility of others’ insides (quite literally in Peggy’s case). After all, if Peggy can be pregnant for nine months without anyone’s knowledge (including her own), what other surprises lurk beneath the surface?

Through both the characters it represents and the way it represents them (namely, serially), Mad Men unsettles our usual confidence in the transparency or legibility of character. As the series would have us remember: People are not always what they seem.³⁰ That observation has ramifications not only for anthropology and epistemology, but also for ethics. How valuable could sincerity (i.e., the congruence between avowal and actual feeling, between outsides and insides) be in a world in which it cannot be confirmed?³¹

How valuable could sincerity be in a world in which one cannot confirm it even in oneself? The show recognizes better than most the formidable human capacity for self-deception.³² In Peggy’s Season 2 flashback, Don’s advice, whether real (the result of Don’s actual hospital visit) or imagined (the result of Peggy’s medicated state), is to block out traumatic events from her mind in order to move forward.³³ Referring to Peggy’s baby, his own past, and even this visit to the hospital ward, Don (again, whether real or imagined) tells Peggy: This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.³⁴

At its most provocative, then, the show insinuates that the truth about one’s identity may be mutable. Confronted by Betty’s discovery of his past life, Don insists that he is not Dick, but Don. When Betty asks, What’s your name? Don replies, with neither irony nor evasion, Don Draper.³⁵ While he admits that it used to be Dick Whitman, from his own point of view (not just ours or Betty’s), Don is Don. His conversion from Dick to Don has been so complete that it makes as much sense to call him Dick as it makes to call St. Paul by his pre-conversion name, Saul of Tarsus. From the looks of it, Don believes in the mutability of the self, if not also the truth. Given our temporal existence, humans possess the power of habituation, i.e., the power to transform ourselves through temporary pretension and habit into something we are not or, at least, were not.³⁶ Unsurprisingly, moral judgments about such pretension (a word with pejorative connotations) and inauthenticity (an equally pejorative term) are usually negative.

More surprisingly, though, those judgments are sometimes positive. To take what may be the most surprising case, Immanuel Kant (again, known for his demanding prohibition against lying, including to the murderer on the doorstep) elsewhere defends pretension and habituation. Having acknowledged that the more civilized human beings are, the more they are actors, Kant adds:

And it is also very good that this happens in the world. For when human beings play these roles, eventually the virtues, whose illusion than have merely affected for a considerable length of time, will gradually really be aroused and merge into the disposition.³⁷

In this discussion of permissible moral illusion (his term), Kant recommends nothing less than virtuous theatricality or, in another critic’s words, hypocrisy upward (from the Greek hypocrites, stage actor).³⁸ Kant realizes that, despite the demands of ideal moral theory, actual human beings sometimes need to act their way to virtue.³⁹ Given both human imperfection and temporality, most of us need to fake it—at least, in order to make it. From another angle, given the imperfection of others (e.g., their bigotry), we should be allowed to pretend to be something we are not. Given American anti-Semitism, comedian Jimmy Barrett (née Brownstein) seems justified in using a stage-name, not his own. Furthermore, theatrical hypocrisy upward is the American way. As wife and manager Bobbie Barrett puts the point, This is America. Pick a job and then become the person who does it.⁴⁰

To complicate matters, though, the effectiveness of habituation and human theatricality (i.e., imitation, self-fashioning)—e.g., the success of Don’s conversion from the awkward, inarticulate poor boy of the Midwest to the smooth-talking ad-man of Manhattan—is questionable. The complexity of human identity shows itself, not only in allowing transformation over time, but also in allowing slippage back and forth between earlier and later identities. When she confronts her husband with his secret past, Betty is taken aback by Don’s silence and awkwardness.⁴¹ As Don clumsily drops his cigarette on the floor, Betty looks on in dismay; her husband is a man who never fumbles—or so she thought. Yet, to our eyes, the dropped cigarette is reminiscent of Dick’s awkwardness—in particular, his dropped cigarette lighter in Korea, which led to the first Don Draper’s death and Dick’s rebirth as Don.⁴² By confronting Don with his past, Betty has revived Dick Whitman, as much to her horror as his. When Sally and Bobby disguise themselves for Halloween as gypsy and hobo later in the same episode, we are reminded of Don’s disadvantage and rootlessness, but also his theatricality. In the final scene, a neighbor, having successfully identified the kids’ Halloween costumes, looks to Don and asks: And who are you supposed to be?

Additionally, the series raises pressing questions not only about truth’s hiddenness and malleability, but also about its value. As a minor character remarks, Your mistake is that you’re assuming that, because something is true, that it is good.⁴³ Given our imperfections—again, given the pain, even injustice that might result from full disclosure—how desirable is truth about oneself (i.e., sincerity)? Confronted by Betty about his hidden identity, Don asks: What difference does it make? What if the present self is better than the past self? For that matter, what if the fake self is better than the real self? In light of Don’s past traumatic and abusive childhood or Sal Romano’s vulnerability as a gay man in mid-century America, is sincerity always a virtue to cultivate? Or might it be a luxury prized by the privileged, by those who risk less through self-disclosure and by those who wish to keep the Dons and Sals of the world out of power and prominence? Given the disunified character of the self (cf. people’s complex, contradictory feelings), is it even possible to be sincere? What would it mean for Don to be sincere—how would he externalize both Don and Dick?

Like others before him (including Kant), Weiner is ambivalent about sincerity and truthfulness. When Pete Campbell exposes Don as Dick (i.e., as a liar, a fraud, and a criminal), boss Bert Cooper surprises both Don and Pete by responding, Who cares?⁴⁴ Bert’s indifference to Don’s past—and to sincerity, more pointedly—is borne by three admissions: 1) the ubiquity of human (and especially American) wrong-doing (This country was built and run by men with worse stories); 2) the socially constructed quality of character (A man is whatever room he is in, and right now Donald Draper is in this room); and 3) the priority of sales over sincerity (I assure you, there is more profit in forgetting this [. . .] I’d put your energy into bringing in accounts).

Lest we grow too comfortable with hypocrisy upward, however, the show reminds us of the darker side of hypocrisy downward. As we discover (again, only in retrospect), Don was not the only one disguised in Bert’s office. Faced with the opportunity to score an account with hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, Bert uses what he knows about his past to blackmail Don into signing a contract with Sterling Cooper.⁴⁵ There was, indeed, "more profit in forgetting" Don’s little secret, at least until later. Once again, Mad Men’s seriality exposes the impermanence and imperfection of our moral judgments; Bert’s apparent magnanimity about the problems with sincerity was arguably just insincere self-interest. Ironically, it may take a fictional narrative (about the sometimes fictional narratives of others) to keep us honest about the lives affected by our moral endorsement of truth and sincerity.

As the series would have us know, the truth may set you free, but being free is not always simple or painless.⁴⁶ Due to his commitment to truthfulness in the advertising pitch—more exactly, due to his excessive sincerity, his imprudent candor—Don eventually loses his job in advertising. Following an uncharacteristically dishonest pitch to Hershey (a sentimental story about Don, his loving father, and their trips to the corner candy store), Don decides to come clean. At the end of his pitch, Don concludes, That’s the story we’re going to tell—i.e., that’s the lie we’re going to tell. Committed as he is to the integrity of storytelling, Don eventually confesses his own true story.⁴⁷ As a boy, Dick received his Hershey bar from, not a loving father, but an indifferent prostitute, who rewarded him for stealing change from the johns who frequented his stepmom’s whorehouse. For him, the chocolate bar is reminiscent of, not love, but pretense and isolation. Eating his candy bar alone, with great ceremony, feeling like a normal kid [. . .], Don (or rather Dick) experienced the only sweet thing in my life. That sweet thing has now somehow called him back to himself. The authenticity the bar embodies (The wrapper looked like what was inside) has challenged him to be sincere, to make outsides and insides, as well as past and present, align. Thanks to the nostalgia it invokes, the bar has transformed Don back into Dick. However, it has, in the process, also called him back to the problems he harbors with advertising. Echoing longstanding complaints about the superfluity of advertising, Don tells the Hershey execs, If I had my way, you would never advertise. You shouldn’t have someone like me telling that boy what a Hershey bar is. He already knows.⁴⁸

With that comment, Don has become too candid—perhaps, too honest—for advertising. With that, he has also rejected the foundation on